Apple has launched an open source software framework for medical apps, targeting doctors and researchers who wish to use their smartphones to collect and use data.
ResearchKit will allows users to collate data from the iPhone’s Health app, including weight, blood pressure, glucose levels and asthma inhaler use, with the intention of improving diagnoses and contributing information to wider studies.
Jeff Williams, senior vice president of operations at Apple, said: "iOS apps already help millions of customers track and improve their health.
"With hundreds of millions of iPhones in use around the world, we saw an opportunity for Apple to have an even greater impact by empowering people to participate in and contribute to medical research."
Apple hopes that ResearchKit will also allow doctors to recruit more participants to large-scale studies through remote participation in surveys, whilst also cutting down on paperwork since the subjects work entirely through an app.
"When it comes to researching how we can better diagnose and prevent disease, numbers are everything," said Eric Schadt, the Jean C. and James W. Crystal Professor of Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
"By using Apple’s new ResearchKit framework, we’re able to extend participation beyond our local community and capture significantly more data to help us understand how asthma works.
"Using iPhone’s advanced sensors, we’re able to better model an asthma patient’s condition to enable us to deliver a more personalized, more precise treatment."
